New Orleans Journal; And Hubig's Said, Let Them Eat Pie

By ADAM NOSSITER

Published: January 10, 2006

This city savors some pleasures not so much for what they are as for what they were.

Thus the local esteem for the Hubig's Pie, a glazed turnover of fried dough and fruit filling, sugary-sweet, palm-size, modest in its aspirations but, since the 1920's, unaltered. And, until Hurricane Katrina, never absent.

But for four months now, New Orleans has done painfully without: Hubig's lost half its employees and a third of its trucks, and returned to huge cracks in its ancient bakery.

Monday, the pies were back. All over town, any driver the Simon Hubig Company could find walked into whatever grocery stores were open, bearing cardboard trays of pies, palm up.

In darkness they went forth from Hubig's dilapidated converted stables on Dauphine Street on a quiet block in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood, with apple, coconut, pineapple, lemon and sweet potato (made from fresh Acadiana yams, freshly boiled). The fat baker on the waxy white wrapper had returned.

''Yay!'' said Shannon Alsherees, clapping her hands behind the counter as the Hubig's man bustled into the Jetgo market on Magazine Street. ''They're going to be so happy to see that,'' Ms. Alsherees said. ''Since the day after we came back, they've been asking.''

The first customer in the store slapped a lemon Hubig's on the counter, and Ms. Alsherees called out to the grumbling driver, ''That's all y'all leaving us, that little bitty box?''

On another route in Metairie, a suburb west of the city, the story was identical.

''People have been dying for them,'' said Ann Moore, the manager at Danny and Clyde's, a convenience store. ''The people have been saying, 'Where is Hubig's?' A lady said to me, 'What am I going to do?' So now they're back, after four months.''

One customer, a laborer in overalls, sidled up, eyed the delivery and commented, ''Ah, the pies are back.''

All by itself, in its cheeky package with its freckled, smiling chef, wearing a silly baker's hat inscribed ''Savory Simon'' and jauntily holding a pie aloft on his thumb, the little pie encapsulates a part of the culture here. The intense localism, for one, helps explain it: the pies are distributed only in this area. The trucks do not venture farther because, as the owners like to boast, the pies have no preservatives. (In the past, though, they were available on the Internet.)

And then, the pie, like the po' boy (a French bread sandwich stuffed with whatever you like), is a great marriage of form and function. A workingman's everyday pleasure, it can be picked up for 89 cents at the corner hardware store, along with nails and quarter-round moldings.

This is not haute New Orleans. But in the rougher world after Hurricane Katrina, that is only to the pies' advantage. ''Certain people wouldn't have wanted our pies, say, in their hospitals,'' said Andrew Ramsey, a third-generation bakery operator who also works as a New Orleans police officer. ''Post-Katrina, they're happy to get what they can.''

The Orleans Parish jail is traditionally one of Mr. Ramsey's biggest customers, ordering thousands per week -- apple and lemon being the inmates' favorites.

In their history alone, the pies capture some essence of this city. They originated not here but in Fort Worth, an immigrant's inspiration after World War I. Their creator, Simon Hubig, expanded his company in the 1920's to nine cities, mostly in the Southeast.

All the bakeries eventually failed except the one here, where locals have fiercely supported it for decades. The pies have issued from the same spot since the early 1920's, pressed into the same shape, using the same cast-aluminum wheel.

''I think it has to do with the diet of the New Orleanians,'' Mr. Ramsey said. ''You give them a little fried, glazed dough, and people around here are going to eat it.'' Besides, at under a dollar, a pie is ''a very reasonably priced commodity.''

For generations of schoolchildren, a Hubig's was the midday meal. Robert Oulliber, a Hubig's vendor, said, ''A lot of people who grew up here, they would skip the cafeteria, go across the street and buy a pie and a chocolate milk, and that was lunch.''

Mr. Ramsey's bakery did not flood during Hurricane Katrina, but the storm was tough on it in other ways. Damage to fleet and building aside, many of his employees were from the Ninth Ward and no longer have houses. Many customers are gone.

In the final days of August, with the water in New Orleans rising, Mr. Ramsey loaded a truck with pies to hand out the bakery's last production: 10,000 pies baked as the winds were gusting ahead of the storm.

He pushed the truck a little too far into the water on that humanitarian mission, and ruined it. Another truck was vandalized.

Now Mr. Ramsey seemed delighted to be starting up again, despite the setbacks. ''We lost people and we lost suppliers, but we've rounded the corner,'' he said. ''We've got a handful of dedicated people.''

As for the missing customers, he said: ''The people have migrated. We're just going to have to find them.''

Photos: Larry Saucier delivered Hubig's Pies to the Danny and Clyde's convenience store yesterday for the first time since Hurricane Katrina hit. (Photographs by Cheryl Gerber for The New York Times)